Patrick Kells was Coca-Cola’s Director of Retail Merchandising when the Disney Springs store was being designed. His brief to the team was simple: “It wasn’t just a retail store. Our main objective was making sure that people had a great experience.”
And crucially, he defined success not in revenue terms but in behaviour: guests immediately picking up their phones to post about it, and wanting to bring other people back to experience what they just experienced.
That brief — written before a single product was ordered or a single shelf was placed — is why the Coca-Cola Store at Disney Springs works the way it does nearly a decade later. And it’s the thing most brands and venues get backwards when they think about brand retail partnerships.
A logo on a building doesn’t make people walk in. A recognizable product doesn’t make people stay. You need a draw. And the draw requires genuine investment — not in fixtures or fittings, but in the kind of experience infrastructure that makes a retail space feel like somewhere worth going rather than somewhere you happened to pass.
The Decision That Made Everything Else Possible
Before Coca-Cola thought about what to sell, they thought about what to build. And what they built on the second floor of the Disney Springs store was, by any honest measure, a theme park attraction.
Ford AV — a professional AV integration firm with prior experience on Coca-Cola’s Las Vegas store and the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta — was brought in at the design stage, not after. Not as an afterthought. Senior Account Manager Michael Burton worked with Coca-Cola and design firm IDL Worldwide in whiteboard sessions to conceptualise what the Polar Bear Experience would actually be before the building was finished. That timeline matters. The experience infrastructure wasn’t fitted around the retail space — the retail space was built around the experience.
What they built: an 18×1 ribbon video wall of Planar displays in portrait orientation showing the polar bear welcoming guests into his habitat. Fourteen floor-embedded video screens showing arctic animals swimming beneath your feet as you waited in the queue — so immersive that, as Kells described it, “you don’t know you’re in a queue because you’re walking on a video platform.” A custom LN2 liquid nitrogen fog system. A pair of Rosco X-Effects projectors creating a live Aurora Borealis effect on a specialised projection surface. Six Martin theatrical wash fixtures for lighting. Interactive frost touchscreens where guests could wipe away ice to reveal polar bears playing underneath. A Reflecmedia chroma-key screen for professional photography. An Alcorn McBride show control system tying all of it together, with custom music composed specifically for the show. Crestron control on every floor. The whole thing designed to run on a timed show schedule, multiple times a day, with a theatrical entrance complete with lighting changes, music cues, haze, and the bear emerging from the aurora effect.
This is not retail design. This is attraction design. The budget, the team, the timeline, and the technical specification are all consistent with what you’d find inside a theme park, not a gift shop.
And that was entirely the point.
Why the Investment Drives the Revenue
Here’s the thing about spending that kind of money on an experience inside a retail store: it changes the entire commercial logic of the space.
When guests walk into a standard brand retail environment, they’re in shopping mode. They’re evaluating product, comparing prices, deciding whether they need something. The mental calculus is transactional. They buy or they don’t, and either way they leave.
When guests walk into a space where the floor is a video screen showing arctic animals swimming beneath them, where fog rolls in and a seven-foot polar bear materialises out of an Aurora Borealis effect, where the show they just watched was built to the same technical specification as a theme park attraction — the mental calculus changes completely. They’re not in shopping mode anymore. They’re in experience mode. And people in experience mode buy differently. They buy more. They buy as memory-making rather than as acquisition. They photograph it, post it, and tell people about it — which is exactly what Kells said the success metric was.
The merchandise on the ground floor benefits from this whether or not the guest went upstairs. The halo of knowing there’s something genuinely worth seeing in the building makes the whole space feel more premium, more deliberate, more worth engaging with. You stop longer at the display table. You read the labels on the collaboration merchandise. You notice the “Coca-Cola Store Exclusive” badge on the mug wall in a way you wouldn’t in a space that felt like just another shop.
The rooftop bar benefits from it too. Guests who’ve just had a genuine experience somewhere are primed to extend it. Climbing to the third floor for a Beverly from Italy or an Inca Kola float feels like the natural next chapter — not a detour to a café.
Everything stacks because the experience at the centre of the store raises the emotional temperature of the whole visit.
The Layers That Keep Running
Once you’ve got the draw — once you’ve given people a reason to seek the place out — the other revenue layers have room to work.
The ground floor runs on volume and impulse. The 30-foot chandelier made from repurposed Coke bottles anchors the central table and pulls guests toward the best-sellers. Apparel, drinkware, socks, keychains at $4.95, a $10-and-under zone running the length of the checkout counter. Every price point is covered, and the floor layout is designed so that almost nobody leaves empty-handed.
The second floor serves a different buyer — slower, more deliberate, higher spend. Die-cast Coca-Cola delivery trucks. Funko Pops. Jigsaw puzzles. Enamel pins. A collectibles wall that takes time to work through. The can customization station, where at $7.95 you can print your name, a date, a nickname or a message on a Coke can and leave with something that didn’t exist before you walked in. That last one is worth pausing on — it converts a commodity product into a personalised souvenir, which is a different category of purchase entirely. The display case of completed examples does the selling without any staff involvement: you see “Windish Family Vacation — Orlando” on a can and you immediately understand what you’re actually buying.
The rooftop bar is its own destination. Open air, views across Disney Springs, a menu built around the international Coca-Cola portfolio — Beverly from Italy, Inca Kola from Peru, Sparletta from Zimbabwe, Fuse Tea, mocktails, floats, a rotating drink of the month promoted on a sandwich board at street level before you’ve even decided whether to go in. The rooftop has its own revenue stream, its own reason to visit, and it feeds back into the retail floors on the way through.
And then there’s the collaboration calendar, which is the mechanism that keeps all of it fresh. On my last visit: Coca-Cola × Oreo (“Besties Forever — Limited Time”), Coca-Cola × Crocs in acrylic display cases, Coca-Cola × Champion, Coca-Cola × Spirit Jersey, and the permanent Coca-Cola × Walt Disney World co-branded line. Each one for a different buyer. Each one time-limited or exclusive in a way that creates urgency. The store’s physical footprint doesn’t change, but the floor feels different every few months — which means repeat visitors have a genuine reason to come back, and first-time visitors have a genuine reason to buy now.
What This Means If You’re Running a Venue
The lesson here isn’t really about Coca-Cola. It’s about what happens when a brand makes the decision — before anything else — that the experience is the strategy, not an add-on to the strategy.
Most brand retail in venue environments gets built the other way around. The retail space gets designed, the brand fills it with product, and then someone asks whether there should be something experiential in the corner. That sequencing produces spaces that feel like what they are: shops that tried to add a draw after the fact.
What Coca-Cola did was hire Ford AV before the building was finished. They had whiteboard sessions about what the experience would feel like before they thought about floor plans or fixtures. They built an attraction first and let the retail wrap around it. The floor-embedded video screens, the custom show control system, the LN2 fog, the Aurora Borealis — none of that is decoration. It’s the foundation that every other revenue layer is built on.
A logo on the outside gets people to glance at the building. The attraction inside is what makes them walk through the door, stay for 45 minutes, climb three floors, buy a personalised can, grab a beverage on the roof, and post about it on the way out.
That’s the model. And it works because Coca-Cola was willing to invest in it before they had any guarantee of return — not in the space itself, but in the experience that gave the space a reason to exist.
Photos by Dustin Fuhs / The Immersive Lab. Technical detail sourced from Sound & Communications magazine’s documentation of the Ford AV installation.